India’s Best Co-ed Boarding Schools 2017-18

For upper middle class households who believe in no-nonsense holistic, character building primary-secondary education in which the right balance is struck between academics, co-curricular and sports education in bracing climates, the country’s legacy boarding schools are still the preferred option. Here are India’s Best Co-ed Boarding Schools 2017-18 Despite the criticism of trendy leftists and jholawallas that they are bastions of the elite, it’s a healthy feature of Indian democracy that the country’s traditional or legacy boarding schools, many of them established during the heyday of the British Raj, have not only survived, but flourished in independent India. For upper middle class Indian households which believe in no-nonsense holistic, character-building primary-secondary education in which the right balance is struck between academics and co-curricular and sports education in bracing climates — the majority of vintage legacy boarding schools are sited in the country’s unique hill stations — legacy boarding schools are still the preferred option. Moreover with air, noise, water and automobile pollution of India’s 374 cities sliding from bad to worse, legacy boarding schools, which also tend to be more affordably priced than the new genre of international schools, are enjoying a new lease of life.  Yet the fact that today the number of respected co-ed boarding schools, which were a small minority in pre-independence India, is greater than the number of exclusively boys and girls boarding schools added together, is a telling indicator of the development of progressive and egalitarian attitudes in middle and upper middle class households in contemporary India. Unfortunately, the gender respect and egalitarianism that children learn in legacy (and international) boarding schools is the exception than rule in Indian education as testified by the rising incidence of gender crimes across the country.  It’s also a telling indicator of the intellectual distance India’s legacy boarding schools have travelled since the end of the British Raj, that the country’s top-ranked co-ed boarding school for the past five out of six years is the Chittoor (Andhra Pradesh)-based, home-grown Rishi Valley School (RVS, estb. 1924) which teaches its 360 boys and girls the nature-friendly and anti-consumerism philosophy and tenets of seer, educationist J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986). Getting a reaction from Siddhartha Menon, an alum of Delhi University and IGNOU and principal of the school since 2013, to the consistent top rank awarded by EducationWorld/ C fore’s SEC ‘A’ respondents to RVS, is a difficult proposition. When interviewed in 2015, Menon expressed “perturbation” at the “increasingly widespread tendency to rank educational institutions” and claimed to be “mystified by the methodology”. Last year Menon delegated the task of responding to RVS’ #1 ranking to vice principal Dr. Anantha Jyoti who similarly expressed the opinion that “we don’t believe rating and ranking of schools or students serves much purpose”.  While it could be argued that the RVS management’s proclaimed modesty is a cover for refusal to share its best practices which could benefit India’s struggling primary-secondary sector, there’s no doubt that led by RVS, the six Krishnamurti schools across the country have evolved…